Yeah, ud3 is good, Gigabyte uses good quality stuff for their digital VRM so you should be golden...
If not the z77x-ds3h is a mighty board!

Ok I'll see what my budget can allow. I'd really like to spend the extra cash on the 3770k and 660 tho
Which motherboard was the good intel one? it was probably already said but I just want to make sure.

Ok I'll see what my budget can allow. I'd really like to spend the extra cash on the 3770k and 660 tho
Which motherboard was the good intel one? it was probably already said but I just want to make sure.

This will get u 5ghz + guy in our club has one and has had it up to 5.5ghz

I personally would prefer the i7 3770K too, as per Anantech's review and Guru3D. It's a slight win for the 3770K, but take account that some tasks do not scale performance linearly with core increase (single-threaded benchmarks emphasize single-core performance, but I'm not talking about this). Some tasks just are not coded that way. There the better per-Hertz and per-core performance actually make a difference, and why I recommend an i7 over Piledriver. For very good scaling tasks, like H.264 encoding, the Piledriver is slightly better, and reviews reflect this. For mostly anything else, i7 seems better in most cases. As further proof, a quote straight from Adobe, dated this year:

Quote:

Originally Posted by adobe.com

Photoshop takes great advantage of 2-4 cores. 8 cores doesn’t give you anywhere near twice the performance of 4 on most operations in Photoshop (or in most other programs either). Partly for that reason, the increase in the number of cores per processor is slowing. We don’t expect to see mainstream processors with 16 cores on them, because almost nothing would use them — they would just sit idle most of the time.

Each new feature in Photoshop has to be written to take advantage of multiple cores, and some features that were written when even 2 CPUs were a luxury must be modified or significantly rewritten to get any benefit from a 4- or 8- core machine.

It frustrates me how some people blindly favor AMD or Intel without taking into account usage scenario (and of course price bracket). In most usage scenarios, if money isn't a problem, Intel will work better.Edited by seepra - 11/26/12 at 7:09pm

but I run loads that are FAR to heavy to do that continously. I have had several MSI board, they have all benn fine, had tons of asrock,gigbyte, etc to, all those have been fine. I always buy top quality psu's, Voltage ripple will destroy VRM's in a hurry.Oh and the 970 has a nice cooling array on the VRM's from the factory now.

Your not going to be able to do heavy video encoding at 5ghz, even with the best water cooling loops. Why people are obsessing over "omg its 5ghz" is beyond dumb, That cpu will likely top out around 4.2-4.4 ghz with heavy encoding loads.

Ok I'll see what my budget can allow. I'd really like to spend the extra cash on the 3770k and 660 tho
Which motherboard was the good intel one? it was probably already said but I just want to make sure.

your better off to put your compute power where it makes sense, put more budget to the video card, particularly if you have cuda accelerated software. Save the cpu $, put it in the gpu, where it will actually really make a BIG difference.